Data Plans

AT&T has introduced two new data plans for tablets, a lower-cost day pass and a three-month plan. The day pass costs $5 and gives you 250MB of data for 24 hours, while the three-month plan, aimed at infrequent users of cellular data, will cost $25 and give you 1GB for three months.

No sooner were people were able to keep their unlimited plans instead of being forced over to new, data-limited ones when buying new phone at the contract price. That was thanks to a recent glitch in Verizon's online order system. Verizon, however, has now closed the loophole yesterday, and now customers are presented with Verizon's current options. Yeah...

Today EE (formerly Everything Everywhere) announced that all 700 of the Orange and T-Mobile stores will be re-branded as EE by the end of the month to coincide with the 4G roll out. The news arrives along with some special EE staff training that is happening at the NEC in Birmingham where 12,000 internal staff and 3000 partners will learn about the new brand.

Pre-orders are now open at EE UK for the iPhone 5 and as well as giving you the ability to get your order in quick I am pleased to say they have some new data packages to cope with the ever evolving cloud options that us smartphone users now get. Users will also have the option to switch over to the 4G service once it goes live here in the UK. As you would imagine prices of Apples new iPhone are pretty steep but EE have some nice options depending on which model and which data allowance you will require. The following information I have acquired from the Orange website, however T-Mobile do have some slight alternatives.

iOS 6 will allow users to use FaceTime over the cellular network as opposed to just Wi-Fi. AT&T has released a statement saying they will not charge extra for the FaceTime over cellular feature but you'll need to be on one of their new Mobile Share plans in order to have access to it.

Verizon's CFO Fran Shammo mentioned at the J.P. Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference recently that anyone migrating from 3G to 4G devices won't be able to grandfather in their old unlimited plan and will have to instead take a data share plan scheduled to launch this summer.

iOS 5.1 snuck in a 4G indicator on the AT&T iPhone 4S. When asked if they felt like their phone was running at mind-bending speed, one commenter smartly replied "Lightning fast. I can't wait to get throttled even sooner now." This encapsulates the conundrum of 4G data, and a problem currently faced by new LTE iPad owners.

If Verizon's new tiered, capped data plans make the kind of sense that doesn't, don't worry -- Phil Nickinson from Android Central has broken them down for us. Check out the chart up top for the details, and here are the bullet points: